A guy made a magical discovery in high school. The paralyzing shyness, the fear and self-consciousness vanished with a few beers. And thus began a pattern of craving and destruction…
“The mind is its own place, and in itself. Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” — Paradise Lost, John Milton
That most perplexing and hellish of maladies, alcoholism, is much in the news again, as it will and should be when suspected in public offices demanding great judgment.
It’s a condition that’s plagued mankind — and usually been a slur stubbornly denied by the chronically besotted — pretty much since the first fermenting of grapes.
Literature is soaked with it. There are almost as many classic chronicles of addiction and alcoholism — the allegorical Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,Under the Volcano, The Lost Weekend, A Fan’s Notes — as there are about the grand passion of romantic love. In both genres, the ends are usually disastrous and self-inflicted.
The New York writer Pete Hamill, author of A Drinking Life, now decades sober, knows something about the topic. All experiences of addiction, he says, have certain similarities of form.
They begin with entry into Paradise through discovery of a magic potion or pill or powder — a place where we are relieved from pain, boredom, fear.
“Paradise is the world made brighter, more vivid, more charged with drama and laughter and the illusions of love . . . The shy become vivacious. The frantic are numbed. The unacceptable world is transformed.”
For that’s the nub of it, the addict’s inability to accept the world as it is and overpowering need to alter his perception of it.
During the Descent, pleasure dwindles, problems multiply. Spouses, friends, employers, doctors, judges might try to intervene. But the addict, with his or her genius for self-delusion, will have built from a lifetime’s lies thick walls of denial. For the alcoholic, locked in the distortion chamber of the self, it is always, as Hamill describes, someone else’s fault.
“In this form of the blues, we always hear the protest of a child: Look what you made me do.”
The next stop, Hamill says, is Hell. “By then, almost everything has been cast aside: family, work, talent, friendship, hope, pride.” What triumphs is the need for more, relentless and insatiable.
Class, wealth, status, intelligence, talent have nothing to do with it. Addiction is a scrupulously democratic affliction, syndrome, disease — call it what you will. You’ll find it among world leaders as well as on the corners of West Baltimore — from home run champions like Josh Hamilton to artists like Amy Winehouse to some who wear the Order of Canada on their lapels.
It’s a careening between euphoria and despair, grandiosity and cringing self-pity in minds that have no temperate zone. It’s warped perception or emotions. It’s abnormal neurology. It’s a damaged soul. Spiritus contra spiritum, said Carl Jung. Spirits against the spirit.
Whatever it is, it is bottomless pain for the sufferer and all who care for him or her. It’s Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses or Mickey Rourke in Barfly. Or Nicolas Cage filling the shopping cart in Leaving Las Vegas. Or Denzel Washington emptying the minibar in Flight.
It’s suicide by the glass, a lonely twilight existence aptly summed up by Dorothy Parker, who passed her final years in a pathological alcoholic haze.
“Don’t feel badly when I die,” she told a friend. “I’ve been dead for a long time.”
Each tale of human addiction — tedious in its endless repetition — is different merely in the details, Pete Hamill says, and follows a similar narrative arc. Here is one such story:
A guy — he could be named Joe, maybe Charlie, it doesn’t matter — found it in high school. And it was a magical discovery. The paralyzing shyness and self-consciousness, the fear, the sense of inferiority and not fitting in vanished with a few beers.
It felt as if he’d been born about three drinks short of normal and, a few taken, became as funny, as good a dancer, as confident and self-assured as the next guy. Besides, in the culture from which he came, working-class, sports-crazy, Celtic roots, drinking was a measure of manhood.
The problem was that, once started, he had trouble stopping. There were embarrassments. So he gave it up for Lent that first year at university — not yet a man, but already, on some level, fearing the kind of man he’d be.
Forty days convinced him all was fine. How could anyone be an alcoholic and do without for that long? It would be a long time before he did without for 40 days again.
The patterns developed. A few beers at lunch, the nightly gathering of the kindred after work (sneers at any who couldn’t hold their drink, or who left early for home and family), the weekend free-for-alls.
His capacity became huge. And, in his shrinking circle, such praise was a badge of honour — membership in the ranks of hard-working, hard-playing characters unfettered by convention and dreary routine.
By now, he was almost always drinking, drunk (even, as was Denzel in the cockpit, while high-functioning) or recovering from being drunk.
Alcohol is a depressant. Withdrawal is its opposite. He came to each morning, jolted to fragmented consciousness in a state of intense agitation, horrified as the details of the previous night’s excesses came back to him in bits and pieces.
The agitation and the shame required remedy. And more alcohol was it. He was at the bar on opening, drinking now, not for any state of euphoria, but to numb and medicate himself sufficiently to function.
Years passed. The mornings hurt a little more. The hangovers lasted longer. His wife complained. Promotions were lost. Social life dwindled to nothing. Hobbies, sports, reading were abandoned. There were episodes of anger and rage, what Upton Sinclair called “the cup of fury.” The tension in his home was heavy. When his wife greeted him with a kiss, it was less from affection than for a quick sniff to gauge his intake.
To buy peace, he devised strategies. He drank only on weekends. Or only wine. Or only beer. Light beer. Water between beers. Nothing worked. He would swear off. Having meant it when he promised abstinence in the morning, he was always astonished when, usually within mere hours, he failed.
The nub of it, though he could not see, was the phenomenon of craving that the consumption of alcohol set off. He could, upon drinking, no more stop the craving than the person allergic to strawberries could, upon eating them, stop the hives. The craving dwarfed all other concerns.
He craved that long-ago experience of Paradise. He had a mind that told him, no matter the decades of evidence otherwise, that this time would be different. But he could no longer guarantee his actions after that first drink was taken.
A couple always led to another bender of wasted days or embarrassing nights, to more lies — especially to himself — to cover his tracks, to explain a life that left him bewildered.
Those closest to him paid most dearly. Holidays ruined. Kids’ birthdays missed. A no-go zone for a home. More anger and disgust at him. More guilt, remorse, self-loathing within. The exhausting daily effort to summon a fraudulent face of normalcy for the world.
Inevitably, an awful place was reached. He could not imagine living any longer drinking this way. And, after all this time, could not imagine coping with the world without it.
Until one day, after years of failure, his brokenness was so total that a light came in. He found that there were others just like him, who would, at any hour of any day, show him a different path. He needed only muster the willingness to follow.
We tell these tales, over and over, because some other just like us might hear in a stranger’s words the story of his or her life, and the hope that there is a solution.
Jim Coyle had his last drink March 22, 1993, in London, Ont.
